How Twitter Improved My Blog – Topic 80

This is my first Blog Assignment post, so I chose a topic I thought would be fairly easy to blog about. Famous last words, I’m starting to realize.

I first started blogging in January 2006, right after my husband and I separated. My first blog was on MySpace – does anyone even remember MySpace anymore? It was a private blog, and only a few of my close girlfriends had access to read it. I used the blog as a quick and easy way to update my friends about what was going on in my day-to-day life, it was easier and more efficient than emails or phone calls. At the time, I never thought I would want to publish a public blog. At the time, I didn’t think anything I had to say would be remotely interesting to anyone who didn’t know me personally before reading it.

I continued posting to the MySpace blog for just over a year, pretty much the entire time I was single between my separation from my ex and when I started dating again in March 2007. It’s possible that once I started dating, I had less time for blogging. It’s more likely that I lost interest in MySpace shortly after I signed up for Facebook, in January 2007.

Sometime later – and I can’t be really accurate, because I don’t really remember – I started a Blogger blog and posted to it sporadically. This blog was not private, but it was not publicized. I still didn’t think I had anything interesting to say.

In the summer of 2008, I started a home-based jewellery design and crafting business. I created an Etsy account. I thought that blogging might help promote my work, and increase my sales. So, I started a blog, that I posted to regularly, and that I attempted to publicize through various social networking tools. The entire venture was a lot more work than I was ready to commit to. I wound up closing up shop, but in the meantime something extraordinary had happened. I had written posts intended for public consumption. I had gone to other people’s blogs to read what they were writing and left comments. People had followed me back to my blog and commented on my posts. I had experienced blogging as it is meant to be, and I was hooked.

I immediately started one personal blog and one crafting blog. I spent hours going through Wordpress templates, trying to find the right look. I spent money hiring etsy artists to created banners for me. I joined numerous blogrolls, and spent hours every evening reading blogs and commenting and trying to increase the traffic on my blog to a satisfying level. Over time, I got totally burnt out. I ended up combining both blogs into one, and I posted very infrequently.

In October 2009, my husband – this one’s a keeper – and I decided to have a family and THIS blog was born. This blog is meant to be a journal of this exciting time in our life, a way to record what we are feeling, what we are going through, and what events – both major and minor – are happening in our lives. The theory is that someday our child will want to know these things. Someday, I’ll want to remember these things, and this blog will help me with the details that might otherwise have been lost – unless I accidentally lose a month’s worth of posts.

[For the love of Pete, I've written 575 words already and I still haven't mentioned Twitter.]

This blog is also helping me create a link to a community of mothers. Admittedly, I am most interested in connecting with local mothers – or at least mothers in the same province as I am. Having said that, I totally understand the value of forming relationships with mothers everywhere. Being a parent is the toughest job in the world – so I’ve been told, and I anticipate completely agreeing – and the bigger the support network I can build BEFORE I become a mother, then better equipped I will be. I’m not suggesting that I will learn parenting skills by osmosis just from interacting with other moms. I am suggesting that mommy bloggers are a tremendous resource to each other, and I want in.

This is where Twitter comes into play. I was using Twitter before we decided to try to become parents, before I started THIS blog, but I doubt I understood its full capabilities. Once I knew who I wanted to connect with, who I wanted to start reading – and commenting on – my blog, I started following people who met my criteria. The beauty of Twitter is that you begin by following one person – in my case a mommy blogger I have been friends with for over 15 years, since WAY before she was a blogger or a mommy – and she re-tweets something interesting that another person tweeted, so you follow this person, and she re-tweets something interesting and the whole thing snowballs until you are following hundreds of people who meet the criteria of your target audience.

Hopefully, you are using proper Twitter etiquette – which many people have written incredibly informative blog posts about, just Google it – and many of the people you are following are following you back. Here’s where it gets fun. Most people will tweet about new blog posts they write – there’s one way to promote your blog right there, just don’t overdo it. Most people will retweet about blog posts they have read and enjoyed – there’s another way that your blog may be promoted, provided your posts are the kind of thing people want to pass along to their followers. You can even promote your own blog by reading the blogs other people are tweeting about and posting relevant comments – including your Twitter name (mine is @WannabeMomErin). Wait a minute, how is leaving your Twitter name on someone’s blog promoting your blog? Well, I usually will start following someone who has commented in my blog – providing the comment was relevant and interesting – and a lot of other bloggers do too. Next time you tweet about a blog post you wrote, your new followers will get that tweet in their feed.

Tweeting about my blog updates, and others retweet about them is great, but that’s not the most important way that Twitter has improved my blog. I only follow a couple hundred people on Twitter, and I only have a couple hundred followers. I’m very satisfied with these numbers, because I try to connect with all the people I follow. I use Twitter to engage in conversations – sometimes it’s short and sweet, I comment on someone’s tweet and they reply; sometimes it’s more lengthy with numerous replies back and forth over the course of the day. When I post to my blog and one of my Twitter friends leaves a comment, I can send them a quick tweet thanking them – some of those lengthy back and forth conversations start in this way. When one of my Twitter friends tweets about a new blog post, I read it as eagerly as I would my “real life” friends’ blogs. Twitter helps round out the blogging experience by adding a real-time messaging element to it. Not everyone who comments on my blog is a Twitter friend, and not all my Twitter friends comment on my blog; but my best Twitter friends are also bloggy friends, and vice versa.

What’s your take on Twitter?  Do you find that it helps improve your blog?  Are there other ways to use Twitter that I don’t know about?  I’d love to hear what you have to say on the matter.

If you made it all the way through this post, you deserve a prize.  I didn’t follow ANY of the tips for making a post more interesting – like adding photos or other media.

Related posts:

1. Blog Assignment Tuesdays progress reportSo, you may have noticed that I have not posted...
2. Blog Assignment TuesdaysErin was reading about ways to improve our blog and...
3. Blogging is an Art…… it takes skill and talent and creativity. It also...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.